Even in those devices, they could whip them. Having a GPU natively access any part of system RAM without onerous copying (and the sync latency that comes with it), and then the CPU use the results (skipping the lag again). A discrete card won't be able to replace that.

But that would require developers to make use of these features and I don't see AMD making any effort at making that happen, and even if they did, it's still a hard sell for devs to put in that much effort for (currently) niche devices. Sad.

I really wish AMD would push the HSA aspect of their APUs. Having GPU memory in the same address space as the CPU is huge. If developers actually leveraged this they could make software significantly more powerful than the paper specs would suggest (or rather, they would truly represent the paper specs unlike now where the latency and cost of large memory transfers to/from the GPU kill the chances of GPGPU algorithms being used for real-time interaction.)

Once I can afford a small test rig, that's definitely what I'll be working on. So bring on Zen and more price drops please!

Wow, I didn't think so many people would have non-firing actions on the mouse. Not that any of us are uber-pro headshotters but doesn't having movement or other actions on the mouse cause pressure or mouse movement right when you need to fire?

While I'm not going to try and dissuade you from purchasing it during a sale, as you'll probably get your money's worth, I do want to mention that the bad Steam review that was definitely not the opinion of just one guy with an axe to grind.

I know the developer of StarDrive and he really did do all those things and really is not apologetic about any of it. He does love games and making games. But he also doesn't give much of a shit about people as can be seen in his public responses on Reddit and the Steam forums.

The game isn't abandoned per se, there are some minor patches, but the majority of his time is clearly going to his new endeavors. StarDrive is not my kind of game so I have no first hand experience but even his die hard supporters and modders admit that there are still some major breaking bugs, out-of-memory crashes can still occur(your system memory does not matter), balance issues, shallow tech tree, and major lack of any challenge/content late game. If you buy it, you should mod the hell out of it and save often.

Given the amount of success and audience the game found, I would have expected more continued love from a developer, not the opposite. You don't remove content from a game you plan to improve just to be able to call it "feature complete." You don't announce that your one-man studio is starting not one, but two new projects while your five-month-old game still has massive bugs.

jacobvandy wrote on Oct 15, 2013, 00:13:Completely unappealing compared to something like the Oculus Rift or even Omni treadmill.

The video doesn't expound on it but the KS page shows a clip-on that covers and routes the projector images onto the lenses, apparently allowing for either image+passthrough background (AR) or just the digital image (VR).

No idea how well that works in practice but it might be comparable to the Oculus. The curved lenses in the Oculus might make all the difference though. But at least you wouldn't be tied to their surface thingy.

Creston wrote on Sep 27, 2013, 10:59:One thing that did have me a bit worried, though, was that the units seem to all clump up and be idiots when they move, as opposed to the neat movement in formation from the SupCom series. Can anyone with early access confirm whether or not those formations are in there? And how's the UI? As utterly BRILLIANT as SupComs?

I haven't played the newest patch but there haven't been formations so far. I think they are confirmed as a feature though. Overall the UI is great. Been awhile since I've played SupCom but this feels the same plus a little streamlined. The building menu has group hotkeys so you can quickly filter the icons/choices by type such as factory, defense, econ. The shift overlay for queued commands doesn't show paths (yet?) which I've missed (even though it could be confusing) but it may be coming. But lots of other bits work perfectly like factory waypoints and patrolling.

For everyone else wondering about idiots and pricing, meh, it's just a matter of priorities versus budget. Some of you probably buy and play a lot of games. Me not so much but I can afford to. So when the next SupCom appears and I can play *now* and support the dev team as well (somehow missed the KS campaign or the graphics threw me), it's a fairly easy decision.

I've never even wanted the interplanetary features either although that may change after I play with them. I just like the fact that there's no way to corner turtle. The generated terrain can really make for some interesting battles too. My only wish at this point (assuming they keep patching and polishing as well as they have been) is that Stealth gets modded in after release. I had sort of assumed it was on the official plan.

I've not played StarDrive yet so I can't speak to the current state (or bugs) but I do believe the late game slowdown is solved, or will be soon. The developer had added multithreading when I saw it last week but again, not sure if that made it into release or will be patched.

Not to be pedantic, but online games do not simply vanish from existence once they are shut down.

The publishers/owners could release the server executables to the public when they shut down, but they choose not to. That is why the game ends, not because of some magical property of being an online game.

We all know that won't happen, but even if it did, just because a new player can see all the same content 5 years after I did doesn't mean they are playing the same game. Patches, content updates, and, most importantly, the community at that point in time are all integral to the "true" game.

You can log into Everquest today and do some quests around Freeport but it won't be anything like it was for me and thousands of others in the weeks/years after launch. Call it zeitgeist or whatever you want, but the true experience of a game, of a work of art, is often wrapped up in the community and culture at that time. Can you play Super Mario Bros. 3 today? Yes. Would that experience be anything like it was when it came out? No. That experience has arguably vanished from existence.

That is sad, true, but like someone else already mentioned, makes the memories fonder. All I'm saying is that this happens regardless of the online/offline properties of a game.

PHJF wrote on Aug 7, 2012, 18:08:OK, you and the fifty other people on the planet who swear by ARMAII are absolutely right.

Arma II is not a shitty game by any means. It's just terribly made. Bug-filled, horrible performance, terrible convoluted control scheme, and bad animations.

Ummmm that's my definition of a shitty-ass game. What standards do you go by?

I think Rattlehead meant that gameplay is the standard. Settlers of Catan is a good game regardless of the quality of the materials used to play it. The interactions encouraged and afforded by the rules are what make it good.

I've never owned or played Arma2 or DayZ, I'm just saying a lot of the problems mentioned are sort of meta, not so much the game but the buy-able product. Like if Settlers was sold with rocks and twigs as game pieces.

Control schemes though, that is definitely gameplay and kinda unforgivable.

I know this isn't an ever-present problem anymore, but traditionally Alt-Tabbing out of a full-screen game caused a loss of video context. This meant that all the graphical resources needed to be re-sent to the video card once you switched back to the game (and all the resources for the desktop (Aero, etc) needed to be loaded before you could fully alt-tab out).

These days I think it depends heavily on the game and whether or not it's DirectX or OpenGL (as well as the user's system of course). If you're running on high settings with a beefy video card and 4GB of system ram, I doubt the programmers are going to decide to keep an extra 512+MB of ram tied to their game client (outside of the actual game logic) just so that they can copy it all back to the video card in case of emergency. Which means they need to get the (likely compressed) data off the hard-drive again.

But then again, many of today's 3D engines are constantly streaming large amounts of updated graphics data to the video card per frame, so maybe they have most of it sitting in system memory already.

Regardless of the technical aspects, it's a really dumb decision. Once you are in the game, you shouldn't need anything outside of the game to keep playing. What if MS Word 20XX had spell checking in a separate app? Would anyone say "oh just Alt-Tab and Ctrl-V! Those are PC standards, people, duh!"

Acleacius wrote on Dec 23, 2010, 23:18:id has coded several engines which sucked at many things and excelled at other things.

This is exactly my point. The definition of failure is attempting something and to not succeed. To say that they failed at skies or suck at creating skies is wrong. They were simply trying to succeed at making brown-colored corridors run really well. And they did. And they did it so well, and made such "fully functional" engines that practically everyone licensed them at one point or another.

The only engines that don't suck at large outdoor environments are those that were designed exactly for those environments. The Peggle engine (whatever it may be) sucks at outdoor environments. It doesn't even have skies. Is it then fair to say that the Peggle programmers failed at skies? No. Is it fair to say that any engine they program forever after will suck at skies? No.

If I code a text file parser, I'm not trying to code something else. If you then try to make it do something else, you don't get to blame my technical skills when it doesn't work or works poorly. So when I say the engine can "do anything it tries to do" I don't mean "can do anything you try to do with it after it has been created."

I am in no way trying to say that an id engine can do anything. Or that modders or anyone else can accomplish any goal or load any kind of level with an id engine.

What I am saying is that Carmack and company are extremely capable when it comes to graphics technology. And while I have no opinions on the Rage engine itself, I tend to believe that if they designed it to have big, beautiful outdoor scenes, then those scenes are going to perform wonderfully.